Anders Celsius

Anders Celsius was a Swedish astronomer, physicist and mathematician, born in Uppsala on 27 November 1701 into a family of scholars: his father, grandfather and uncle all worked in astronomy, mathematics or botany. He became professor of astronomy at Uppsala University in 1730 and from 1732 to 1735 toured the major observatories of Germany, Italy and France. In 1736 he joined the French expedition to Lapland that measured a degree of latitude and helped confirm that the Earth is flattened at the poles. He founded the Uppsala Astronomical Observatory in 1741, collected observations of the aurora and was among the first to link auroral activity to changes in the magnetic field. In 1742 he proposed the centigrade temperature scale that now bears his name. He died of tuberculosis in 1744.